Porn and masturbation addict

Hi H&B,

You might try
www.settingcaptivesfree.com

Praying for you...
TruthSeeker

H&B,

Welcome!  As a man perhaps the age of your grandparents I don't know that much of my experience is likely relevant to your situation, but I do very much wish you well in your journey!

Everett,

A lot of your suggestions are quite useful, but of course they're the surface layer of what has to be a much deeper transformation.

I'm also completely gobsmacked by your notion that recovery from porn addiction is easy and that all one needs do is to through out one's stash and install a filter.  Has that been your experience?  Tell us about your addiction and about how your recovery is going.

If it was your experience that letting go an addiction was easy, it certainly wasn't mine, nor do I think it's a common one.  There is enormous hope for addicts of all sorts, but for real addicts, finding freedom requires enormous personal change and courage and vulnerability and surrender.  It's the hardest thing most of us will ever do.  It's also the most important and the most blessed.  But to toss recovery off as something easy to do is completely to fail to grasp the nature either of the problem or of the solution.

Tim M.

Interesting.

See, that wasn't my experience. I made a variety of attempts to deal with my addictive behavior as a technological problem - to fix my problem by changing things outside myself.  For me, that didn't work.  The technical fix might keep me from acting out for a few weeks or months, but then the inner drive to return to my addictive pattern would win, and I would do whatever it took to overcome the external barriers.

From my time hanging about on fora like this one and in 12-step circles, I think this is a common experience.

To make any progress, I had to accept that my problem isn't a technological one.  It's an emotional and spiritual one.  It has deep roots inside me.  In order to give up my addictive behavior, I need to get a handle on those deep roots and to make very fundamental changes in who I am and in how I perceive the world and other people.  That sort of personal transformation is unbelievably rewarding, but it's also incredibly frightening and difficult.  It's not easy.

Again, the 5-1/2 years I've spent in addiction recovery circles make me think that (many? most? all?) addicts who get sober and stay sober need this complete and thoroughgoing change of heart.

I wonder if we're using language the same way?  Like the AA Big Book, I'd make a distinction between an addiction and a habit, between being an alcoholic and being a heavy drinker.

Giving up a habit can take willpower and may involve some short-term pain until new habits can be established, but there's nothing very deep or hard about it.  For me, giving up alcohol and caffeine were like that.  Giving up a habit may well require nothing more than a tool like a filter to block the habit temporarily until the need disappears.

For the real addict, though, I don't think it's that simple.  Saying to an alcoholic, "It's easy to give up drinking.  Just pour out your stash and stop buying more," doesn't work.  That's precisely what the alcoholic can't do, often despite many previous attempts.  Similarly, saying to the real porn addict, "It's easy.  Just throw out your stash and install a filter," doesn't work.  That's precisely what we can't do, often despite many previous attempts.

For the real alcoholic and for the real porn addict, there is a real sense in which the addiction isn't the problem.  Instead, the addiction is our solution to deeper problems - an unsuccessful and dysfunctional solution, but a solution.  From that perspective, my real problem isn't my use of porn.  My real problem is my fear of other people, my fear of myself, my sense of my own deep wrongness and inadequacy, my rejection of myself as an emotional and a physical being, my isolation, my lack of trust in others, in God and in myself.  That problem is what drives me to seek solace in porn, and that problem is why I keep returning to porn regardless of what I may do superficially to address the use of porn by itself through filters or accountability or getting rid of computers or whatever.

Until I can address those deeper problems whose surface manifestation is the porn addiction, I'll never be free.

For the real addict, a filter might be a useful tool to buy a bit of time in a moment of weakness, but a filter can never touch the real problem, the emptiness underlying the porn.

Changing how the Internet works on my computer can't solve my problem.  After all, I was a porn addict long before the Internet existed.  I don't need the Internet at all in order to pursue my sex addiction.

So it's wonderful that you managed to give up porn by just installing the filter.  Splendid!  Good for you!  But to think that your experience can be replicated by those of us with real addictive behavior growing from deeper roots is, I think, deluded.  For us, it isn't easy.

That's not to say that there isn't enormous hope for us.  There is.  I know people who have been sober in this addiction for 15 or so years, and people who have been sober in AA or NA for much longer than that.  But that sobriety isn't a consequence of a simple technological trick.  It's the fruit of new way of life that it takes enormous courage to embark upon and a lot of hard work to maintain.  It's a gift that we are enabled to perceive and to receive only by giving up everything else.  And for those of us who have spent decades holding for dear life onto the illusion of control, that's about as far from easy as it gets.

Just how it's worked for me, of course, and for the addicts I know.

Tim M.

Hi H&B,

In Romans 7, the Apostle Paul, who God used to give us most of the New Testament, who God had redeemed from persecuting and killing Christians, shares his own sense of inadequacy.  In chapter 8, Paul starts with the joyful assurance that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and concludes with the incredible comfort that nothing can separate us from the love of God.  You are not alone in these feelings.

TruthSeeker

One thing called my attention, you said you are trying to be a good christian girl. Don't try to please other people just be yourself.
The real gospel changes the person form inside out. About your addiction I would you recommend reading about it. I like this article quitporn.net/blog/2010/04/step-quit-porn-addiction/. Hopé you will also too.